


Between

by tevinterimperium



Category: Assassins - Sondheim/Weidman
Genre: Alcohol, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Canon Related, Character Study, Gen, Identity Issues, Post-Canon, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-21 22:45:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14924288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tevinterimperium/pseuds/tevinterimperium
Summary: He is neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor The Balladeer, but rather something or someone in between. He sees Czolgosz raising his gun and firing. He feels Guiteau's heartbeat pounding beneath his hand. He hears Booth crying on a barn floor. They are just as bright and vivid as the weight of the rifle in his hand and the pushback as he shoots the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.Some of it is blurry. Most of it is impossible. Either way, he is stuck in a carnival surrounded by a bunch of would-be assassinators until the end of time.





	Between

**Author's Note:**

> i think of the content of ASSASSINS as effectively fanfiction of the various successful or famous presidential assassinators and therefore i think of this as fanfiction of aforementioned fanfiction. ASSASSINS itself is not entirely correct in its portrayal of these people and i've taken that idea and run with it as you will see.
> 
> obviously i don't condone any of these actions, people, etc.

“How’d you die?”

“What?”

“How’d you die?” Fromme asks again. She’s lying with her head hanging off of the nearby bench as Lee digs through the prize section of the water-gun arena, finding stuffed animals covered in dust. He sets aside the ones in better shape, silently offering them to Fromme by placing them on the wooden counter. He doesn’t say anything. Fromme hasn’t said anything, either, until now.

He doesn’t really know. “None of your business,” he says. Lee wipes his wrist across his eyes and blinks, hard, further digging into the mass of creatures. He tosses back a brownish rabbit that’s about half of Fromme’s size.

Squeaky doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, and though Lee doesn’t glance back at her, he knows that she’s pursing her lips. It’s a sort of amusing expression on her face, her eyebrows smushed together and her bottom lip pointed out.

“Fine,” she says, placing the heels of her feet onto the bench and swinging her body up. “I can just ask Hinckley, anyway.”

Something about one of the cohabitants of the world between life and death knowing everything about Lee Harvey Oswald unsettles him, not that he should be unsettled. He has come to understand, through those to follow him, that his life was on relative display. He’s sure that he was in the papers and talked on the radio, analyzed and picked apart and torn to pieces. That unsettles him, too, but not more than Hinckley and his library of books on Lee. Hinckley sitting late at night as he reads Oswald’s name over and over. Hinckley thinking of him as he goes to purchase a gun, as he goes to assassinate– _who was it again?_

“No,” Lee says firmly. Squeaky stops to let her legs dangle off the bench. “Don’t–ask him. That’s not necessary.”

She quirks up that little eyebrow again. “Why? You think it’s weird that he knows everything about you?” Lee doesn’t respond, just keeps on peering through the prizes, but his silence is enough. “I think it’s weird too. Plus, it’s not like he knows Jodie Foster. I get that she’s pretty and all, but really.”

Lee doesn’t say much. He doesn’t have to, because, in a way, his reputation precedes him, even to those who came before him. He feels the phantom hand of Booth grasping at his shirt, the phantom touch of Czolgosz weighing on his back, the phantom voice of Guiteau whispering in his ear. He feels the three of them coming together and coexisting in his headspace, something that was once solely his, that he can only reclaim here, in the quiet moments of the carnival as it spins and spins and spins in eery silence.

The thing about Lee is that he doesn’t really feel like Lee, not the one that he was supposed to be, not the one in Hinckley’s books or in Booth’s images. He is neither God nor the devil, neither the bringer of justice nor the bearer of destruction. He wouldn’t have hooked his finger back if not for the crying uproar of those around him, of the weights of both the past and the future pressing in on him. He wouldn’t have become the man he is to history without the voices of one hundred years behind and twenty years before him weeping for their creation and their elevation.

He thinks about this a lot. He has nothing else to think about.

“Did you not read the papers?” Lee asks at once, pressing his weight into the wooden countertop that now separates him from Fromme. She has her knees pulled into her chest, looking rather like a child. A stray gust of wind blows a stray gust of hair. She is gazing at nothing in particular.

“What papers?” she asks without turning to him. That’s something that Lee likes about her: she was never all that interested in him, in any of this.

“When he died,” says Lee, and doesn’t need to explain.

Fromme seems like she’s considering it. Lee is used to the silence between them, which is odd because Lee shouldn’t be used to anything. He should be rotting in hell with the rest of them, or his existence should have been overcome with infinite blackness. Instead, he watches Guiteau strut across the pathway with The Proprietor on his arm about thirty feet off. They disappear into the clutter of tents at the northeast corner of the carnival and Lee tries to ignore the fact that that is normalcy.

Fromme tilts her head to one side, having watched the scene before them, but still focused on his question. “I was fifteen. I didn’t really read papers. I heard about it. You couldn’t go anywhere without _hearing about it._ The Death of the American Dream.”

Lee feels a pang–a pathetic sort of pang–deep within his chest. He doesn’t entirely remember The Balladeer, doesn’t care to know, but there is always something in Booth’s eyes as he looks at him, something in The Proprietor’s glimpse. He doesn’t know who Lee Harvey Oswald is, but he also doesn’t know who The Balladeer was. He is stuck in the middle between heaven and hell, Oswald and Balladeer, villain and hero.

He feels Czolgosz’s gunshot ringing in his ears. He feels Guiteau’s heart beating against his hand. He feels Booth’s every move overwhelming him. Guns shaking figures, bodies losing air, blood seeping through a handkerchief.

He only gets glances. Brief, agonizing glances of scenes that aren’t his.

“You were a pretty big deal, you know.”

Fromme is watching him. She is squinting even though there is nothing but clouds for miles, and for once, Lee actually believes her. “I guess.”

“Don’t you ever wonder, though?” she asks, turning back out to nothing. “Like, have you ever considered reading Hinckley’s books? Finding out what they said?”

“No.”

Squeaky screws up her face at that, as though she’s offended. Lee looks at her, and she looks at him. “I would, if it were me.”

“Why can’t you?”

“No one gives a shit about _us,_ Harvey,” she replies, bitterly, kicking out her feet in front of her. “Too close together. Too boring. Crazy girls who don’t know what to do with a gun.”

He thinks, for a moment, that none of it was worth it. Maybe in some sense, in the grander scheme of the world, it was a fulfillment of destiny that would be pushed upon him. There is something in that, but there is nothing in the sentiment behind Squeaky's words. It feels commonplace, foolish, irrelevant. He was to bring them all together. Perhaps he failed even in that.

“No books,” Squeaky continues, “or anything. You got tons of books. You got the most books out of anyone.”

“Not more than Booth,” he says to assure himself, and he doesn’t know why Booth keeps on coming to his mind, why his name keeps coming to his lips. They are the bookends for something that Lee doesn’t quite understand. They are opposite sides of the same coin, or were, and now rest parallel. They are drawn together and apart by their very natures.

Fromme glances at the sky. “Vainglorious actor,” she mutters. “Seems pretty simple to me.”

“It’s not,” Lee says, “he’s not. I don’t think. I never read up on him, on any of them. I don’t even know who–,”

“That’s the whole _thing,_ Oswald. You didn’t know. Not about any of them except for Johnny, but he’s–well. I think if Honest Abe weren’t as popular, then no one would’ve given a shit about him, either.”

“It was Booth who made him as popular as he was,” Lee says, half to himself, “people wouldn’t have cared about him if he wasn’t killed.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I know.”

“I thought you didn’t read up.”

“I didn’t,” he says, sharply, curling his fingers around the wood. Squeaky realizes that that’s the end of the conversation and turns back towards the quiet running of the carnival.

The Ferris wheel screeches from the other side. Zangara dangles from the top, Moore next to him. A part of Lee insists that he doesn’t know who Zangara tried to kill. Another part of him knows that it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 in Miami, before his inauguration, that he would be sentenced to first-degree murder for the death of the mayor of Chicago, that he would die with bitterness in his heart as electricity short-circuited every wire in his body.

One thing that Lee knows about The Balladeer: he knew far too much about all of this. He must’ve always been listening, always watching.

“I was shot,” says Lee. “They were escorting me–somewhere. Someone came up in front of me and shot me.”

“Where?”

He rubs his hand along his abdomen, feeling where the skin is sore. It shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be skin at all. He should be dead and decaying in a grave somewhere. Instead, he feels where the gunshot would’ve been and feels Fromme’s eyes upon him. “Point-blank,” he says, “I don’t remember anything after that.”

“What was it like?” she asks, and he notices that devious glint in her eye. He was dead before Charles Manson was a cult-leader for the ages, but he once asked Moore about it. She gave him a sort of funny look, as if it was odd to even ask.

“Cold. Too fast. Bright and dark at once.”

“Hmm.”

Lee spares a glance at her. Fromme is watching as the Ferris wheel spins, now with Zangara and Moore’s descent. Despite the population of the carnival, it always is too quiet. Lee feels the wind running past his ears, the ruffle of it hitting the awning. He leans forward to rest on his forearms, his hair getting hit awkwardly by the gust. “Are you… I mean, out there, have you…?”

“Died? No. Still alive and kicking. Just… frozen.” She bites the inside of her cheek. “It’s just, Charlie always said…”

Lee scoffs. He shouldn’t, because the expression on her face is something of tangible vulnerability that he think might break at any moment, but the coldness eating at his chest makes him want to throw her precious Charlie back at her.

She doesn’t break, of course, but she furrows her eyebrows. Her voice is strained but bitter. “You can say all you want about him, but you didn’t know him. You weren’t even _alive._ What would you know?”

“I don’t want to know anything about him,” Lee says harshly, “I don’t care about him, or this. Christ. I don’t even want to be here.”

Fromme doesn’t respond for a second. She peers at him, as though she’s assessing every aspect of his face. As if she’s analyzing him through his scowl. He’s tired of being analyzed. “You want to die.”

“I _did_ die,” he says, voice growing louder, “I was shot. I should be _dead,_ Fromme, don’t you understand? I’m not like you. I didn’t have some righteous, Godly cause. I killed him because I was _told to._ I’m not like the rest of you–you–,”

“Freaks,” she croaks. “You think you’re better because you had no reason.”

He doesn’t need to respond. He doesn’t intend to, either. He swallows hard and looks from Fromme to the Ferris wheel. They’re reaching the bottom now, Zangara daring to peer over the edge, Moore pressing herself next to him to gaze at the approaching ground. The gondola squeaks. The whole wheel squeaks.

“Well, Harvey, I think not having a cause is worse than having one,” Fromme announces suddenly. She stands, a blur of red fabric. “Maybe you should try to find something to hold onto.”

She turns on her heel and skips in the direction of the bumper cars, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. Lee watches. She doesn’t turn back, and eventually, she disappears into the distance like the rest of them, fading into the background of his mind as he tries to recall what life was, but never being able to reach it.

 

…

 

Something that Lee doesn’t realize is how history fades together and the past is neither that nor the future. Everything coexists in the present, the din of centuries coming together in a way they shouldn’t. Theoretically, Booth should be the one who knows the least. In actuality, Booth knows the most, but still, he understands the least.

They’re sitting at the popcorn stall and drinking. Czolgosz doesn’t say much. Booth says quite a lot. Lee serves the three of them beer and drinks to nothing in particular.

Booth is discussing how technology advanced at the beginning of the twentieth century. He’s trying to explain how cars changed the workplace, though Czolgosz doesn’t care and Lee already knows enough about that. He had been forced to take a history class or two.

“The widespread sale of the automobile relies almost entirely on the creation of assembly lines,” Booth is saying with an odd amount of fervor for someone who would die forty years before any of it happened. “If not for the technique, I’m sure they wouldn’t have gained popularity.”

“Bullshit,” Leon mumbles into the top of his beer bottle, “Assembly lines are an excuse to mistreat hardworking men. Men are not _machines._ ”

Lee has the gall to comment that eventually men would be replaced by machines, but he tilts his head back and has another sip instead of speaking.

“What else should a man do?” Booth asks, raising an eyebrow. “Efficiency and employment reached an all-time high in those years. Don’t tell me you think that’s _inhumane,_ Czolgosz.”

The way Booth says _Czolgosz_ with his odd, old-fashioned drawl makes both him and Lee tick. He holds out the second syllable for longer than he should, longer than he needs to. _Chole-gawsh,_ he says, smiling.

Leon doesn’t turn to him. “You know nothing of work, boy. You earned your pay by looking pretty on a stage. Most of us had to _work._ Most of us died because of _work.”_ He pauses. “Most of us killed because of it.”

John doesn’t say anything. Instead, he looks rather intently at the lines of Czolgosz’s face. Lee looks rather intently at the curve of Booth’s smile.

He clearly does not calculate his next words. “I worked just as hard as you did. As anyone did. Acting is an art.”

Czolgosz whips his head to meet him, venomously. “You don’t understand, do you?” he asks through his teeth, “Every single thing that you touched, every single costume you wore, every fake knife, gun, skull–whatever–you and your Shakespeare–was made by a man, a man who could never dream of earning as much pay as you would in a single night. You think because Mr. Lincoln treats you poorly, frees the slaves, starts war–you think this makes you one of the hopeless ones, the lost ones. You are not the one dying in war. You are not the one building the guns. Men would die to live like you, and you think because the president proclaims freedom, you are the bottom of the barrel.”

Leon leans very, very close to Booth’s face, and grips the bottle tightly in his hand. “Do not _ever_ think that you are the forgotten kind of America again,” he says, teeth bared, before he slams down his drink and turns off towards the tents.

“Well,” Booth says.

Occasionally, Lee ponders upon the politics of having the assassins of the presidents coexisting in a world of not-quite. The upper class beside the lower. No one’s motives match up, not quite, even for two women aiming for the same president with two weeks in between them. Different times, different men, different worlds.

He cannot fathom the world of Booth, a century before his. Not that he cares to try.

“Have you considered changing the hair?” Booth asks, out of nowhere. He has been watching Lee, particularly his face, particularly the ridges of his forehead. Lee has done his best to ignore him. Booth holds up his head with his cheek pressing into the heel of his hand, rather like a schoolgirl.

“Why?”

He smiles, mischievously, as if it’s a joke. “Black would suit you better.”

Lee sneers. He takes John’s empty beer bottle from his hands, avoiding his fingers by taking it by the neck, and slides another on the countertop.

Booth grips onto Lee’s hand instead of the newly replaced drink, despite Lee’s attempts to avoid it. “Thank you,” he says, slowly, before carefully letting him go and raising the bottle to his mouth. His lips go around the opening, and he tilts his head back, as if it’s the first drink he’s had in years. His throat bobs. His eyes close. He manages half of it down before he comes back up for air.

He is grinning. Booth is always grinning. It annoys Lee for no reason at all.

Lee goes back to fiddling with the innards of the stand.

“Isn’t it curious,” John begins, “that we’re almost one hundred years apart?”

“Hmm.”

“You and I, the two most successful presidential assassins of all time–nothing on Leon or Guiteau, of course, but their targets had far less intrigue–almost a century apart. Your fate all too similar to mine. Isn’t it odd?”

“Maybe,” Lee grumbles, kicking debris into one corner with his right foot.

Booth taps on the table to get Lee’s attention, leans forward onto his forearms, and whispers. It feels like a secret. Maybe it is. “I think it’s destiny.”

“You believe in that?”

“You do enough productions where men of the past are trapped only by their fate and you begin to believe it.”

Lee tries to imagine him on stage. He has seen glimpses of it, monologues performed in the tents for Fromme as his audience, Guiteau waiting to deliver his speech on God and Hell. He remembers Brutus. He remembers Richard. He wonders how many words of another man’s writing are etched into Booth’s memory. He wonders how it doesn’t make him go mad. Most importantly, he wonders if he already _has_ gone mad.

Oswald has made the mistake of looking into Booth’s eyes. He sees weakness, and softness, and a desire to be liked. He sees an actor. He sees a man. He’s forgotten what they were talking about. “You’re younger than I expected.”

John blinks, hard. “Younger?”

“In the history lessons,” he says, “I always thought you’d be older. Crazy and old and dying.” Lee tilts his head to the side, examines him deeply. “Not like this.”

“This?”

Lee shrugs, breaking the moment–whatever it was–to move to the back, as far from John as he can get. The stall has been cleaned up as best as it can be cleaned for half an hour. He doesn’t think he should stop for fear of having nothing to do, for fear of sitting next to Booth and losing whatever upper hand he has. He is sure that he has the upper hand, sure that he has it over everyone in this carnival of Hell, and he doesn’t intend to lose it, not to being tipsy, not to the acting legend of the nineteenth century.

There are a few beats of silence. “So you’ve read about me.”

“I was _taught_ about you,” Lee corrects gruffly, “in class.”

The stupidest, most content grin is painting John's features. Lee wonders for a second if none of the assassins before him chose to tell Booth about how they were taught of him, the proud actor of Maryland, the killer of Lincoln. He supposes, belatedly, that perhaps they didn’t tell him as a valiant attempt to keep his ego in check. Still.

John, who is a little drunk, fluffs up his hair with one hand. “Did the pictures do me justice? The stories? Tell me, Lee, how did history paint John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s killer?”

The answer to that question isn’t as obvious as Booth thinks. There are a dozen John Wilkes Booths littered in a dozen different history books, Lee is sure, first the hero of the South, then the ruiner of the peace. The arrogant actor who killed Lincoln for fame, the tortured soul who killed him for freedom. A dozen different John Wilkes Booths. Lee is sure that the one before him is none of them.

That part of his brain–the one that looks at John Wilkes Booth and wants to pick him apart, find the weak spots, find the spots where he won’t give–must be The Balladeer’s. It doesn’t feel like Lee’s. He doesn’t want it to be.

“Depends,” he says, instead of the various things swirling in his mind, John Wilkes Booth posing in photographs, John Wilkes Booth performing Hamlet, John Wilkes Booth with the president’s blood on his hands. (Lee is drunker than he was supposed to be.)

Johnny hums, leaning forward again, and Lee finds himself wanting to lean back into it. He takes it as a challenge. John, still seated, doesn’t seem to notice. “Depends on what?”

“Where you are, what you believe.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re a–,” John begins to say, but stops himself before he can finish. Perhaps The Proprietor has beaten the rules of manners into him. He scowls in a very mean way, the right side of his lip coming up higher than the left. Then, with a pointed coolness, he concludes, “Well. Times have changed.”

Lee eyes him up and down, looking cruel. He _feels_ cruel. “You should’ve seen the sixties,” he says, “You wouldn’t last for a minute.”

“And _you_ wouldn’t know how to handle yourself in the nineteenth century. Too tall. Too thin,” says John, childishly. Then, he then tilts his head to the side. He examines Lee’s face again. “Too… hm.”

“What?”

“Your face,” he replies, as if it’s obvious, “it wouldn’t fit.”

“It wouldn’t _fit?”_

“That’s not an insult, dear boy, you’re simply too… modern.”

“Too modern,” Lee repeats. He doesn’t feel like his face is all that modern, all that handsome, all that special. That was what always made him useful: the ordinariness of it. Between pretty and ugly, special and boring, unique and ordinary. Lee Harvey Oswald floating by, watching the world drift past him, digging his teeth into things but never getting quite the right grip. Lee Harvey Oswald with no press from the United States as he returned from his defection. Lee Harvey Oswald throwing fits for the lack of an audience.

Perhaps he’s more like Booth than he thinks, yearning for a crowd. They both got what they wanted, in the end, Booth crying for tyrants on a crowded stage, Oswald’s mugshot etched in ink on the front pages of newspapers.

The thought makes him flinch. “I’m going,” he says quickly, angrily, sliding the empty bottles together on the back table, downing his drink and placing it with the others. He wipes his hands on his pants and pulls open the entrance at the side. John watches him with wide, stupid eyes.

“So soon?” he asks, pressing forward. “I finally thought we were connecting.”

Lee considers that for a second, which is a second too long. “We weren’t.”

“You hurt me.”

Oswald looks at him. He has his hands splayed over his chest where his heart would be, if he were alive. Booth's pout contorts his odd mustache in an ugly fashion that manages to distract from his charisma just long enough for Lee to turn away.

“We’re not the same, Booth,” he replies over his shoulder, hiking in the opposite direction. He has a hundred better things to do. His walk is a little uneven, but not enough to deter him.

“We’re more similar than you believe!” John yells to Lee’s retreating back. He sounds like he believes it. He believes almost everything he says, always had, always will. Lee doesn’t reply.

 

…

 

Zangara and Czolgosz are knocking down bottles with a hard rubber ball. One would think that, after their time stuck in the carnival, they would’ve gotten bored of the games. Zangara steps up to the line, setting his jaw, before winding his arm back and throwing.

He knocks down the top three pins, leaving the remaining three in place. “I throw like the baseball men,” he explains to Czolgosz, who studies the ball bouncing to the floor. “Spin the arm back.”

Czolgosz doesn't feel the need to grant that with a response.

Lee has been watching them for over ten minutes, unwilling to join Fromme and Guiteau in their conversations about God. However, to call them conversations would be giving them both too much credit, as Guiteau mostly spent his time trying to lecture Squeaky on whatever tenants he believes in while she tried to interrupt and explain whatever tenants Charlie taught her. They are arguing from the water-gun stand just ten yards over, but Lee does his best to ignore them. He doesn’t know where everyone else is, and he doesn’t particularly care.

Instead, Lee sits at the chair where the man running the game would be, occasionally tossing the ball back to Zangara when he throws with too much zeal. They work in relative silence. Infrequently, Zangara will attempt to make conversation, but Czolgosz is not one for conversation at all.

The sight of Leon taking off his hat grabs Lee’s attention far more than the action does. He has otherwise been gazing mindlessly into the space above Zangara’s head, just as the Ferris wheel tips again and the whole thing groans. However, then there is Leon: he sees the scruffy hair, the messiness, the unkempt quality that must be what holds Leon together. His eyes are the most striking feature of his face. Lee wouldn’t call him _handsome,_ not quite, but the oddness of it makes Lee want to keep on looking at him, so he does.

Czolgosz, hunched over as if trying to hide in his shoulders, rolls the rubber ball in his hand, closes his eyes, and throws it as hard as he can against the second stack of bottles.

He knocks down two on his lefthand side, leaves the ball bouncing behind it. Lee can’t help but scoff.

“What?” Leon spits, taking a daring step towards Oswald. “You think you can do better?”

“Yes,” Lee says, and takes his position.

He bends down to take the ball that Czolgosz has just thrown and feels it in the palm of his hand, throws it up and catches it, swings around the counter to kick at the line drawn in the dirt and step behind it. Zangara eyes him curiously, like he thinks Lee is trying to prove something, but doesn’t know what; there’s always something very _suspecting_ about him, like he doesn’t intend to trust anyone, even though he clearly does. Czolgosz crosses his arms and leans against the wooden post.

The final set up lies untouched to the right of Czolgosz’s. The entire carnival appears to have been modeled after the same experiences Lee would have seen as a child, not that he attended carnivals, not that he had the time. There is comfort in the imagined familiarity of it. The targets to be knocking over are milk bottles, the ball is red and made of rubber, the booth is red and white striped. It, like the rest of their eternal hell, seems like it was abandoned twenty years ago.

Lee stretches his left arm, then his right. He doesn’t know which hand to throw with. The lack of surety in himself reminds him that he isn’t actually Lee Harvey Oswald, not really, not with curtain rods turning into a rifle, ghosts of presidential assassins appearing in a book depository. Impossible, just as impossible as not knowing whether he throws with his left or with his right. He doesn’t know quite who he is or who he’s supposed to be. The two certainly aren’t the same thing.

He puts the ball into his right hand, tosses it upwards once, then catches it. He pulls back his arm, grits his teeth, and throws.

The clanging of the milk bottles all falling to the floor doesn’t surprise him, nor does the little gasp falling from Zangara’s lips. It is rather the raising of Czolgosz’s eyebrow, impressed, that puts a half-aborted quirk to his smile.

( _I respect you,_ Czolgosz says to Lee, the rifle heavy in his hand, Booth in his ear, a crowd of men and women standing before him. Czolgosz does not care for the fluff and seduction of it, as if he knows something that the others don’t, that Lee will inevitably crumble and pull the trigger. Lee had attributed him to the clutter, but now, he realizes, he shouldn’t have.)

“You work,” Leon says. It’s not a question.

“I did. Used to.”

Zangara takes a step forward. In broad daylight, he seems rather young and angry. The furrow of his brow softens. “You not like the others.”

Lee shakes his head. “They worked.”

“They do not know _work,”_ grumbles Czolgosz, “they know writing, reading, acting… nothing of the body. Of sweat and blood.”

Lee wants to say, _It was dreadful._ Lee wants to say, _It was endless._ Lee wants to say, _I couldn’t do it._ He supposes that they already know this, already know every word that Lee thought as he went from job to job, town to town, country to country, searching for work and money and stability. He supposes that there’s no point in saying anything. His life is scribed in a diary that was released to the world.

“I worked in America, then the USSR, then America again,” Lee explains, though he knows he has no need to. “You try to find hope in other places and realize there’s none there, either.”

“USSR?”

“Russia,” Zangara supplies. The thought startles Lee: Czolgosz, the man of anarchism, never knowing of a world with communists running Russia, a world with Americans skittering to stamp it out, a world with red against yellow. Czolgosz would’ve been tempted. Czolgosz would’ve fallen. Czolgosz would’ve defected and had his name on the list printed right next to Oswald’s.

“What did you do?” asks Czolgosz. He is seeing Lee with a different glint in his eye, something of intrigue and affection that Lee did not think he was capable of. “In Russia. In America.”

“The Marines. Electronics factory. Welding company, then a firm. Coffee company. Then the depository.”

“Marines,” Leon repeats, processing it. “You have seen much of the world.”

He could mention the dozens of schools in dozens of towns, the unsure quality of his mere existence, his position floating between states and then countries and then alliances altogether. Minsk is not Dallas, but he blends into each well enough. Perhaps that’s what made it all so easy.

Czolgosz and Zangara could never blend. Too tall, too short, too foreign. He almost feels bad. He _wants_ to.

“I’ve seen enough,” Lee says instead.

“You fought for America.”

“I fought for America first,” he explains. Czologsz wears an odd expression, like Lee is unfathomable to him, like he hasn’t heard any of this before. Perhaps he hasn’t. Perhaps it’s Booth’s little secret. “I left the Marines and joined the Soviets–the USSR. To work for them, to help them. Then I came back.”

“And the Soviets are…”

“The enemy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” Lee says. “Dirty Commies. Corrupting the world.”

Zangara raises both eyebrows. “Were they?”

“No. No, they were just–no.”

Lee’s blood is racing again. He knows it shouldn’t be, he knows that John Fitzgerald Kennedy is dead, he knows that he pulled the trigger, but he left the world just as hateful of Marxism as they were before he squeezed his finger. He’s sure that the newspapers of the communists who ignored him, who forgot him, are hailing him as a hero, but the weak-hearted men of America must be detesting the poor man more than ever.

Oswald supposes that’s how it’s always been. Maybe the man who works with his hands and his mind instead of just the latter can never be on the top, not in America, the land of the free. He doesn’t want to hear the stories of Hinckley, of Squeaky, of Byck, doesn’t want to hear of the Soviet Union falling back into Russia, the rise of capitalism again, of Reagan. He doesn’t want to hear any of it.

They almost tell him the stories, but he doesn’t want them to. There is none of the irony of Czolgosz never seeing the Red of Russia, a man born too soon and dead too young, in Lee. There is only the hint that the world did not unfold after the president’s death, that while the New York Stock Exchange closed, while the schools in Indonesia were shut down, the voice of Lee and Marx and the men before him were never heard loud enough. It makes Lee dig his fingers into his wrists, makes him grip the handle of his gun tighter than he had before, makes him want to curse the world and Moore and Hinckley for ever even seeing it. He wishes it could just be him and the future lying open and endless in front of him, hypotheticals, John Fitzgerald Kennedy dying and with him the future of capitalism in America. The world fixing itself. The country becoming the power that it used to be. All because of him.

Of course, he plugs his ears when Byck cries at men named Nixon, when Moore talks of what succeeds him, and even still the years following John Fitzgerald Kennedy lie open and undefined, names not tied to places or times.

Lee Harvey Oswald, he reminds himself, was not a failure. He made a hero out of the forgotten triers. He made a country cry out in agony. He made his voice heard, his name spoken. With such an audience, he thinks, he could never fail.

 

…

 

Byck and Fromme are speaking of politics in the open mouth of one of the tents. As it often happens, Hinckley has subconsciously followed them, though he sits about three yards off as he reads a novel on his knees with slight interest. Booth is propped on a chair, stretching out his bad leg. Lee has somehow found himself eavesdropping on the whole affair.

Sam is becoming increasingly invigorated about something or the other, and Fromme is only half listening. Lee is pretty sure that she never cared to follow the politics of the time, and doesn’t particularly care now, but she feigns intrigue to a certain degree out of sheer politeness.

At once, out of nowhere, The Proprietor strolls into the center of the gathering. Byck stops short, and instead watches as he strides to where Hinckley is seated and kicks him in the shoe.

“Here,” he says, then drops a book onto his lap. He turns elegantly on his heel and starts walking away in the same direction from which he came. “New delivery.”

“What’s–?”

“A gift,” The Proprietor says, smiling like he could eat Hinckley up. He looks to him with undecipherable meaning, glances at Lee with the exact same expression, then takes his leave just as quickly as he came.

Lee watches him as he goes. There is an invisible tether roping him to The Proprietor, though it is quite unlike the chains that tie Fromme and Moore and Hinckley from their lives running on autopilot, the bondage trapping the souls of Zangara and Byck and anyone before him. There was something–something quiet and violent and subtle between whoever he used to be and whoever The Proprietor is now, a constant back and forth, an equilibrium between the two of them. Here, now, the American Dream is dead and The Proprietor seems to regret having killed it.

That is to say, he looks at Lee like he lost someone, but Lee isn’t sure who he had to lose.

Hinckley, meanwhile, has gasped.

“Another book on your historical _crush_?” Fromme jeers, raising her eyebrows at Lee. Byck laughs deep in his stomach and follows Squeaky as she inches closer to where John is sitting. They crawl on their hands and knees through the sparse grass.

“Shut _up,_ ” Hinckley says.

“ _You_ shut up.”

“I don’t have a–,” he begins to say, but then just remembers that Lee is sitting about fifteen feet away from him on the closest wooden chair, facing the action as it unfolds. He makes half-aborted eye contact, then glances at the book in a deliberate motion as he blushes. “They’re cool to read.”

“If you care so much, why don’t you just talk to him?” asks Squeaky. She lets all her weight drop to the ground and rolls over leisurely, not caring for the way her dress falls. “Hey, Harvey, tell us about yourself!’

“Don’t call him Harvey,” Hinckley grumbles.

“Why not?”

“He didn’t even go by–just–stop it, Squeaky.”

Lee stops them both short. “What’s it say?”

He sits up straighter as he speaks; he narrows his eyes and peers from Hinckley to Fromme to the book. He realizes how he quite literally commands the figurative room, a position which he knows used to be held by The Proprietor or Booth. Fromme and Hinckley, who are appearing an awful lot like children scolded by their father, ruffle. Fromme crosses her arms and leans closer as to see over Hinckley’s shoulder, though keeps her mouth shut.

“It’s just–about you. And Booth.”

John, who has been surprisingly silent for the proceedings, perks up. He has one leg crossed over the other and appears to have been examining his shoe with disinterest instead of paying attention to whatever the others got up to. His vain attempts at detachment are lost as he turns around in his chair and lifts up his chin. “Oh?”

“The–the similarities,” Hinckley manages to spit out. He is perhaps the only one who believes that Booth is a savior of some kind, the second coming. Lee is not sure which John Wilkes Booth Hinckley learned about in school, but it must be different from whatever Lee heard, whoever Lee sees now.

Booth smiles deliciously with the attention. “Similarities between me and Lee?” he asks, though the question is rhetorical and only posed so he can give Lee the most awfully self-satisfied expression that he’s ever seen. There is always the inkling that Booth wants to prove something to Oswald, that he’s worthy, that they’re the same, though Lee has never cared for the competition in the first place.

“There’s just a conspiracy,” Hinckley says nervously, flipping through the pages of the book. “Like, that he–you–were a part of something bigger, I guess.” He looks up palely to Lee, who stares at him blankly. “You’ve never heard about that?”

“No,” Lee says, “I’ve been dead.”

Fromme giggles into her hand. Byck inches closer. Hinckley turns a shade of pink.

“They think you were set up, Lee,” Booth says. He’s lounging and looking quite elegant with an arm draped over the back and a leg widely crossed over the other. “By the CIA, the mafia, the vice president… something for the American public to hold onto, to treasure. That’s your legacy, Lee. The man who acted alone, did the impossible when no one believed that he could.”

Lee frowns. “I didn’t act alone. You were there.”

Booth rises. He leans his weight on his cane as he saunters over to where Lee sits, though the intent glint in his eyes outweighs his limp. He’s about the same height as Lee and far less threatening than he imagines, all soft edges and kind eyes. His hair curls up and falls into his profile, and there is the air about him that he is a carefully combed creature who could never pull of being frightening, but certainly tries. Lee would find it charming, if he cared enough, or if he gave Booth any thought more then he had to.

“Ah, Lee, quite the contrary,” says Booth. He is standing before the chair in which Lee is seated, making a scene, though it becomes clear to Lee that the scene is not for him at all, but rather those around them. He spares the slightest of glances towards Hinckley, who is wide-eyed and childish. “ _You_ were there for _us._ ”

“I’m not some martyr for you to crucify, Booth. I’m not whoever is in all your books, either. I killed the president because you told me to.”

“Because you _had to._ Because you stood for the future, Lee.”

“Jesus,” Oswald mutters, “Do you even hear yourself?”

“Do you know what you _mean_ to them?” Booth asks. He is leaning very closely into Lee’s personal space, the cane parallel to Oswald’s leg and his breath ghosting over Lee’s face. It’s an intimidation tactic that rolls off his back. He thinks that everyone forgets that he had been in the Marines. “You didn’t kill him because I told you to. You did it because you _wanted to._ Deep in that cold, cold heart of yours, Lee, you’ve wanted to kill for a long time now.”

It’s not untrue. Factually, Lee Harvey Oswald has wanted to kill before. He has seen red and white and black. He has stalked a man, aimed a gun, and pulled the trigger. He has run as far as his feet could carry him.

That is to say, John Wilkes Booth isn’t wrong about him, but he isn’t quite right, either. He has wanted to kill before, but never has he done it. He has wanted to kill before, but never has he succeeded. He has wanted to kill before, but never was his target the President of the United States, America’s darling, the People’s hero.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s fingernails are digging into the flesh of his palm. He is an angry man, and that is another thing which John Wilkes Booth is not wrong about. He is angry and violent and tired.

Lee looks at Booth. “Tell us about the similarities, Hinckley.”

Hinckley coughs, and probably fumbles with the pages, but Lee doesn’t tear his eyes away from Booth's solemn expression. He glances back at Lee with the exact same amount of pressure that Lee applies to him, though there is something odd about him, as if he doesn’t believe Lee capable. Lee does not know what Booth is challenging him too, but he refuses to back down before the crowd.

Lee has always been good at things like this, anyway.

“They were both elected in a year ending in 0,” Hinckley says. “1860 and 1960. It was the same with Garfield and McKinley, like, 1880 and 1900.” He pauses and waits for the two successful assassinators of presidents to speak, but they don’t. “Reagan, too. 1980, since you both weren’t alive. Reagan could’ve. Reagan should’ve… _I_ should’ve…”

“C’mon, pretty boy. No one cares!”

“He _asked,”_ Hinckley whines. He has to lean forward on his knees to get into Fromme’s face as she lounges on her back. He looks up with those full, pleading eyes to where Booth and Lee are glaring at each other, neither having moved away. At once, Lee throws his arm around the back of the chair and rotates towards John.

“Keep on going,” he says, smiling.

“You both have three names.”

“Too easy,” Booth scoffs, turning on his heel to front Hinckley. He makes it so he’s parallel directly with Lee. “Find something better.”

“They both had kids die during their terms. Uh, both were succeeded by a ‘Johnson’…”

“Mmh,” Lee and Booth both hum.

“Good,” says Oswald. “Better. Not too convincing, but still.”

“Who was the other…?”

“Jesus, Squeaky, do you even know anything about anything?” Hinckley asks. He resembles a vulture protecting the treasure in his lap, the book full of secrets of the outside world, of men’s theories about those who are in hell. “Andrew and Lyndon B..”

Fromme drops her weight to the ground again. “Oh, I remember _him._ LBJ. He was kinda cute, in a funny way.”

“He wasn’t _cute,”_ Lee grumbles. Both Fromme and Hinckley seem surprised that he even has something to say, though it seems obvious to him that he would’ve been aware of the vice president of the man who he would assassinate during a motorcade. A part of Oswald wants to know what he did, what he fixed, if he fixed it at all. The shining city, the country lying empty before him. Bits and pieces filled in by figures drawn in color, violence and anger, the red of Nixon, of Ford, of Reagan. It tastes familiar and foreign all at once.

He wonders what year it is. He wonders if it matters at all.

Hinckley has taken the uncomfortable silence following Lee’s comment as an invitation to continue. “Both had genetics disease… accompanied by another couple… political children… That’s all basic stuff, easy things that everyone knows about them… Oh!

“You shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre,” he says, gesturing towards John, and then, turning to Lee, ”and you shot Kennedy, who was in a Lincoln car, which is made by Ford.”

Everyone considers that for a second.

“Was it named after him?” Booth asks. His brow is furrowed handsomely, his arms now crossed over his chest. “The car.”

“Named after Lincoln?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure,” Byck pipes up. He is just as bored as Fromme is.

Booth huffs. “Nonsense,” he says, “naming all of these _things_ after him, when he was the one who made the country crumble.”

Fromme, in a comic stage-whisper, asks, “Do you think he knows about Mount Rushmore?”

Sam, in the exact same voice, replies, “I wouldn’t push it.”

“I know _enough,”_ Booth snarls to the two of them, who huddle together like children who believe they’re far better than everyone else. Lee believes him.

“Apparently _you_ were related to Robert E. Lee,” Hinckley announces quickly. He has a habit of speaking solely to Oswald when he’s in a larger group discussion, though Lee cannot entirely blame him. The situation is unfathomable and ridiculous and John Hinckley Jr. is talking to the man he’s admired his whole life and collected every biography on in a ruined carnival where the other presidential assassinators wander. “And, obviously, Robert E. Lee’s surrender sparked… well. The end of the Civil War.”

Byck mutters, “Not in _his_ eyes.”

“You all need to shut your mouth about things you don’t understand,” Booth says viciously, suddenly, “all this talk of Lincoln, of the South, none of you could understand the kind of _life_ I _lived._ You and your modern machines… your cars… your wars fought by White House men. _You_ don’t understand _anything.”_

Oswald scoffs. “Like you fought at all.”

“Like _you_ fought at all. Defecting to the Russians, coming back and hoping to get that attention you’ve always wanted–at least I _got that,_ Lee. I didn’t have to die to get the people to care. Do you know how many papers were written about me? How many raving reviews?”

Lee shakes his head. “You always forget that I know just as much about you as you know about me,” he says, dangerous, cold, and violent. “You could never be as famous as your father, your brother. You could never be as good as them. You could never be Brutus.”

“You _shut your mouth!”_ Booth shouts. “What makes you think you understand me at all!”

“What makes _you_ think you understand _me?”_

“Because I _know_ you, Lee, I know every thought that’s run through your mind, every doubt, every moment of weakness–I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. You are just like me, Lee, just like us. You need to stop thinking that you’re different and start believing that you’re the same.”

“I’m not like you.”

“Yes, you _are,_ goddammit, why can’t you understand any of this!” Booth yells. He is standing all too close to Lee, his free hand balling up Oswald’s shirt. His teeth are bared. He lets him go with a shove the second he stops to breathe a second later. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Something which Lee has figured out is that John Wilkes Booth wants to please him far more than he lets on. _I envy you,_ Booth says as he presses a rifle into Lee’s grip, presses his hands to Lee’s back, presses Lee’s body towards the window frame. It is far more complicated than that, John Wilkes Booth is far more complicated than that, he is constantly torn between shoving Lee away and tugging him closer. Even Lee can see that. Especially Lee can see that.

If Lee Harvey Oswald were a different man, or if he were more Lee Harvey Oswald at all, then perhaps he would shove Booth right back, but he doesn’t have it in him. Maybe it’s because he can remember Booth as he lies on the floor of a barn and waits for the soldiers to come in and tear him to pieces. Maybe it’s because he can see Booth pressing the gun to his head and pulling the trigger. Maybe it’s because he knows that Booth died from an external gunshot wound, not of suicide, but this man before him doesn’t seem to notice that at all.

He doesn’t know why he keeps on falling back into this. He is not sure who he is, who The Balladeer was, who the people before him expect him to be. None of them match up. Nothing seems to here.

“Whatever,” he says. It feels childish–perhaps it is–but he needs to do nothing to gain the respect and love of the would-be assassins around him. “I’m going.”

“Lee, I’m sorry that I–,”

“Forget it,” Lee throws over his shoulder. He shakes off the fingers that are longing to grasp at Lee’s neck, the line of his shirt, the bend of his arm, and Booth’s hand falls to his side. He lets his foot catch on the chair he just sat upon to knock it to the floor. He shoves past Booth and doesn’t look back at him or Hinckley or the wide-eyed audience to which he has been performing because, he realizes, he doesn’t really give a shit.

 

…

 

The Ferris wheel has gone around twice now. It is on the verge of collapsing, Lee is sure, and even with the slow pace of its rotations, it creaks as it comes to a halt at the ground.

There are twenty-four open gondolas. The Proprietor decides to sit in Lee’s instead.

“They’re worried about you,” he says. He waits until they’re three-quarters of the way up. Lee gazes past his shoulder into the fog that surrounds the outskirts of the carnival, the suffocating blanket which keeps the group of them trapped here. There’s nothing to see. Endless stillness. Lee doesn’t feel the need to respond.

“Why did you make a Ferris wheel in a fucking hellhole like this?”

“To lighten it up.”

Lee scoffs. “It shows how trapped you are, if anything,” he mutters, “you see how small it all is.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t consider _your_ tastes, Mr. Oswald,” says The Proprietor. The smile which shifts the whole structure of his face is far different than the one he parades around for those on the ground. He is always performing for them, putting on a cast, a voice, a personage. Lee is sure that he is not a person at all, and never was.

He wonders, fleetingly, if it was different before Lee’s very existence. If The Balladeer made any of it easier. He doubts that he did, but he can imagine. Everything and everyone before him is shrouded in mystery, but is not a code that he has ever tried to crack.

“Do you miss him?”

The Proprietor studies at him. He is searching for the trace of him in Lee’s eyes, his face, his smile.

“No. Not as you would imagine it. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

The Proprietor leans forward on his knees. He looks rather human like this, though there is a distinct feeling that he isn’t. “It is emptier than it was. Not just here, but everywhere. A hollowness, a falseness.

“We were two sides of the same coin,” he says, peering into nothingness. “And it’s much harder to go on without that opposite side.”

“How did you kill him?”

The Proprietor raises his eyebrows. “Kill him?” he asks, then shakes his head. He doesn’t seem offended; he is too tired to be. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Who did?”

“Everyone. All of them. Mostly Booth.”

Lee’s hands curl into fists at his sides. He presses his forehead against the metal rods along the side of the gondola and gazes out into the sky which stretches further than it should. “How?”

“Things aren’t as literal here, Oswald. He wasn’t murdered. He was… overtaken.”

Lee looks at him like he’s crazy. “‘Overtaken’?”

The Proprietor shakes his head angrily, blowing out a breath. “You’re too focused on seeing everything in black and white,” he says, obviously, “humans always are. Life and death aren’t as simple as that.”

“I _noticed,_ ” Lee retorts, “when I was shot and wasn’t sent straight to hell.”

“You’re a special case, kid. You and the rest of them.” The gondola has reached the top of the wheel, and for a moment, they are suspended above the rest of the world. If Lee leans over, he can see the lot of them puttering around, doing nothing, waiting for something that will never come. The Proprietor gestures to them with a wave of the hand.

There is only the sound of creaking before he continues. “He was outnumbered, outweighed. Everyone here was tired of being kicked around, lectured to, told that they’re wrong and misguided and that there’s a brighter future ahead of them.” He scoffs, mostly to himself. “There wasn’t a brighter future for them. They were _dead._ ”

“So, what?” Lee asks, frustrated, like he doesn’t have time for this when they both know he has all the time in the world. “He just disappears?”

“In a way. He’s surrounded. He… fades. You’re dropped in the Texas Book Depository an hour before Lee Harvey Oswald shoots the president. But you also exist before that, but you don’t really come to until then. With Booth.”

“With Booth,” he repeats. He finds himself looking up into The Proprietor’s eyes but he doesn’t know what he’s searching for. “But I’m not quite him.”

“No, but you’re not who you were before, either.”

“ _Christ,_ ” Lee mutters. It makes both perfect sense and no sense at all. His head is aching. He sees the group surrounding him, the chaos, the crescendo, hands coming to his arms and his shoulders and his face, the moment of transformation. It’s blurry. He wouldn’t be asking about it if it was clear. He can remember Booth’s words striking fear in him, the way he names the facts of Lee’s life when he has just become acquainted with them, Alek and Marina and his two little girls.

“I can’t do this,” Lee says. He means it. He’s standing before he can understand why, and the whole gondola cries out at his sudden movement. They’re still far too close to the top. His fingers curl around the edge and he feels his weight tilting back over the ground and back into the contraption. His frustration is buried deep within his chest and it spreads through him up to his knuckles, turning white. He hates it here, he hates The Proprietor, he hates The Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald and every minuscule factoid which brought him to this place, curtain rods and rifles, suicide notes and radios.

His teeth clench. The gondola stops rocking as hard. The Proprietor stays quiet.

“Don’t you think it’s fucked up?” Lee asks. He doesn’t turn around; he gazes into the empty expanse of the carnival instead. “Keeping everyone trapped here.”

“It wasn’t my idea. I don’t want to be here as much as you,” The Proprietor says. Lee can tell from his tone that he’s lounging, an arm thrown around the back of the seat, his head tilted to the side. It’s all the more frustrating.

“God,” Lee mutters, pressing his forehead into the framing again. He closes his eyes and clenches his jaw which creates an ache that unfortunately confirms that he’s entirely real. He still feels the phantom wound blossoming in his stomach, the blood pooling on the ground, strong arms grabbing at his shoulders and carrying him away to die in private like he deserves. He wonders if Booth knows that, how he died in the white hospital bed seeing nothing but black and red. He certainly knows how Booth went out.

He replays those first moments of existence, standing in a book depository surrounded by boxes and the static of the radio. A handgun pressed into his skin. Booth walking in, whistling; Lee doesn’t recognize the song, but he thinks he ought to.

He remembers all of that better than he does kissing his daughters goodnight and dumping off his wedding ring into a cup. These all seem like equally trivial facts, but no matter how hard he presses his nose into the pressure of the gondola and tries to recall his wife’s face, he sees nothing but the vague outlines in photographs, where she is not herself and Lee is not himself, either.

Lee realizes now that the pit within his stomach has been annoyance rather than sadness. He feels like a child being forced to go through the motions of a family outing when he has no desire to, the lack of autonomy and existence, a person who is not a person at all but a thing to be dragged around. He is The Proprietor’s best little trophy, Booth’s favorite plaything, Hinckley’s untouchable idol who has suddenly appeared within grasp.

The gondola, miraculously, comes to a stop at the bottom. Lee looks back at The Proprietor, who has been watching him calmly. Lee wants to be mad. Lee wants to collide his fist with the stupid smile painting his features, can already feel the air knocked out of him and the helplessness which he would fall back into.

He doesn’t. Instead, he throws open the gate and leaves without another word.“I mean what I said,” The Proprietor says. Lee finds himself stopping despite how much he wants to ignore everyone and everything in this place. He can’t seem to move his feet. “About you. And about this place. You’ve got to make the best of it, kid.”

Lee scoffs, crosses his arms over his chest, and stomps off, a little dizzy from the spinning, but thankful to God in Heaven for the solidness of the ground beneath his feet.

 

…

 

Lee is drinking. He has been wanting to taste vodka for a long time now, and perhaps out of pity, The Proprietor tosses a handle onto his mattress and leaves before he can be thanked, not that Lee would’ve thanked him.

He sits with his back pressed against the framing of his bed, his legs splayed out before him on the floor. He is not nearly drunk enough to feel dizzy, yet he is planted in place. He’s powerless when Booth storms in, coat billowing behind him, his pace interrupted by his own limping.

His expression, which is the lines of his skin pulled into that unpleasant scowl where he bunches up his nose and furrows his eyebrows, twitches when he sees Lee before falling entirely.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“It’s my room,” Lee says calmly from the ground, glancing up before taking another pull from the bottle. “I could ask you the same thing.”

The rather annoying fact of the carnival is that it’s lifelike in almost every sense, which leaves Lee’s “room” as more of a tent placed beside a number of other similarly-sized tents for all of his fellow presidential assassinators. His free hand tangles into the grass that is an unfortunate carpeting and tugs it out in large, aggressive handfuls.

Booth peers around the tent with a discontent grimace as he speaks. “Fromme has been looking for you. She’s trying to do some ‘team bonding.’”

Lee takes another sip. “And you just happened to volunteer to find me. I wonder why?”

He lets himself glance up, briefly, to the way Booth shifts at that. The look on his face goes from fairly neutral to irritated, his spine rolling up to become as straight as he can manage. He presses his tongue against his bottom lip in an attempt at calming himself and says nothing.

John turns from where Lee is to the rest of the tent. He did not care to furnish it due to the fact that he never expected visitors, and even if he did, he wouldn’t care enough. The sheer fact that Lee needs to sleep when he’s in Hell never ceases to annoy him. He expected his afterlife to be more freeing than life, but he’s never felt more trapped.

“A little barren, isn’t it?” Booth asks conversationally. He avoids glancing to where Lee sits. “No wonder you’re miserable. This is dreadful.”

“And decorate it with what? Random shit around here? No way.”

“The Proprietor dotes on you enough for gifts,” Booth replies sharply, “I’m sure he’d assist.”

“‘Dotes on’?” Lee scoffs. Perhaps he’s a little tipsier than he expected. He cranes back his head. “Jesus. You sound so fucking old-fashioned.”

“I _am_ old-fashioned. A century before you, remember?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lee grumbles. He slouches a little further. If he peers behind Booth into the opening of the tent, he can see that it’s the tail end of dusk. The sky is a deep orange. The only noises are the crickets and the humming of nature, a detail which Lee has never noticed before now. It makes it seem like everything is alive when everyone here knows it isn’t.

Suspension of disbelief and all that.

“Are you coming?” Booth asks haltingly. He appears far more uncomfortable than he did ten seconds ago, his chin raised, his throat bobbing. Lee thinks he could be a good liar if his body didn’t reveal every single secret he tries to hide.

“To what?”

“To Fromme. For ‘team-bonding.’”

Lee snorts. “No. Are you?”

“I was sent to find you by her, mind you. Everybody _else_ is there.”

“Well, we’re not everybody else,” he announces before he takes another sip. The vodka is getting progressively worse the more he drinks from it. It’s a brand which Lee’s never heard of from Russia, which seems like a cruel joke. Still, his fingers wrap around the handle and he holds it like a lifeline.

“No,” Booth says, “I suppose we aren’t.”

Lee shifts to the right to make room for Booth next to him. He accompanies the movement by a tilt of the head to indicate that Booth really shouldn’t be going anywhere, to which Booth purses his lips and doesn’t move an inch. He probably made such a good actor because of that: his ability to hold a pose.

Not that Lee would tell him that. Not that Lee would admit he was a good actor at all.

“C’mon,” he grumbles instead of anything else that is running through his mind in a heavy, hazy stream. “You’re not actually going to _go._ ”

“You don’t know what I intend to do.”

Oswald raises an eyebrow and smiles wide, all teeth. “Oh, yeah?”

Booth looks as if he wants to speak. It’s rather ironic that he can’t seem to find the words, since he is always overflowing with them. Instead, he clears his throat, leans his cane against the bed frame, and does his best to seem dignified as he sits next to Lee on the grass.

“You got this from The Proprietor?” he asks as Lee hands him the vodka. John is holding it in front of his eyes like it’s a piece of evidence to analyze.

“Yeah. A gift.”

“He does like you,” Booth says while examining the label. “Dotes on.”

Lee actually laughs. He’s not sure what’s come over him. “He likes you, too,” he declares, tapping the underside of the bottle to indicate that John’s allowed to drink from it.

He hums. “Used to. I was always the grandest. You, though, you put on a magnificent show.”

“Coming from you, that’s gold.”

“Coming from me,” he repeats. Booth shakes the bottle, takes a dramatic sip, then winces. “Just as horrible as I remembered.”

“Sorry, Mr. Wilkes,” Lee says, letting his shoulder knock against Booth’s, “some of us didn’t go around only drinking sherry.”

John scoffs. “Whiskey was my poison, Lee. Single malt.”

“Well, you can’t win ‘em all,” he replies, then takes back the bottle for another pull.

He can feel Booth watching him as he takes the drink. He can feel Booth watching him most of the time, though often he at least attempts to hide it, giving himself only quick glances, mere moments of watching before turning back into himself, the arrogant actor of Maryland. Here, he watches, unabashed, as Lee tilts back his head and swallows.

Lee’s heart is beating faster, though he’s not quite sure why. “Did you ever read the books about you?”

Booth clicks his tongue. “No. Always painted me wrong, trying to figure me out through the facts of my life. It’s not nearly as simple as that.”

“No,” Lee says, “it isn’t.”

There is silence for what must be a few minutes. It sits heavy with Booth but Lee is far too used to it, to the deafening quiet of company and of this world, to be bothered. Lee’s head feels heavy. He doesn’t know why he lets himself get drunk with Booth, Booth who told him to pull the trigger, Booth who refused to let him die. He thinks of then and now. His anger then seems childish and savage, a boy throwing punches at nothing for the sake of a reaction. He always did start fights on playgrounds, in school, dirt beneath his fingernails and across his cheeks. The red of scraped knees and elbows. Blood dribbling down noses and past lips. The distance between then and now seems just as gaping as the one between Lee’s current self and the one in the depository. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. He doesn’t know if time has passed at all.

He wonders if Booth remembers his life at all. He’s been dead for longer than he was alive in Lee’s terms. There must have been years of quiet, of endless stretching silence. Some of his facts are wrong. He doesn’t remember his life as it was, but the books, he says, don’t catalog it right either. There is no correct version of John Wilkes Booth in the world. Perhaps it’s for the best.

“You shot yourself,” Lee says. His lips are hovering over the mouth of the bottle. The sound catches.

Booth doesn’t reply, and Lee wouldn’t dare turn to watch his face. He continues. “You said all of this shit about dying. About your legacy and about–what’s his name. ‘Attention must be paid.’ But you–you shot yourself. In the barn.”

“How do you know that?” asks Johnny. It isn’t accusatory, nor is it offended, like what Lee expected. There’s an earnest kind of youthful confusion in his voice. It makes Lee shiver.

“I remember, some of it. Bits and pieces. Mostly you.” Lee takes another sip. “That’s not how you actually died. Gunshot wound. External. Some soldier. I don’t remember his name.”

Booth already knows this. Lee can tell by the way his mouth is slightly open, his eyes having fallen to his hands as his thumbs circle each other. He speaks quietly, gravely, in a way that Lee has never heard before. “Yes. It just wasn’t quite like that.”

Lee says, “I know the feeling.”

They’re quiet again. Booth takes the bottle back and takes another hard sip, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. Lee can’t tell if he’s a masochist or just an idiot. John presses his wrist against his mouth to calm himself.

“I had already made my mark,” Booth says, finally, breathlessly, “I was already finished. I had done everything I needed to do. Lincoln was dead, Davey was gone. It was just The Balladeer and me.” He pauses, faltering. “You and me.”

Booth’s face looks young in the half-light. Lee keeps on forgetting that John is only two years older than him, and while the mustache tries to hide the freshness, the curves of his face are that of a young man. His eyes are wide and far more innocent than they should be. No wonder the women of America flocked to shows for but a glimpse of theater’s darling, John Wilkes Booth. He is handsome, in an awkward, outdated way, a time before Lee’s, a time before anyone’s.

He wonders if the earliness of his existence makes him lonely. Guiteau was alive, he reminds himself, just a few years off, but he saw more of the world than Booth did. Booth lives the life of a man cut short, a man too eager, a man passionate and violent in his early years which cost him the rest of his life.

Lee can’t help but see himself in him, or Booth in himself. He wonders if it matters at all.

“Why is your leg still injured?” Lee asks without thinking. “Why do you limp?”

John pulls his left knee to his chest and examines his ankle. “I couldn’t tell you. Why do you remember The Balladeer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I suppose neither of us can truly forget our old lives,” Johnny says, smiling devilishly, raising an eyebrow, before gripping the bottle and pulling it to his mouth. Lee’s fingers are still wrapped around the neck. Booth’s index presses against Lee’s pinky, though John doesn’t seem to care.

Booth’s cheeks are starting to flush pink. As he pulls back, he runs a hand through his hair, changing the angle of the curls. It’s charming. Lee hates it. There’s another pause, a beat, a moment of suspension.

“What do you remember?” asks Booth. He’s turned so his elbow is on the bed and his hand supports his temple so he can watch Lee properly. The attention makes Lee remember situations before this, moments in stalls, in book depositories surrounded by boxes and shouts.

“About The Balladeer?”

“Yes. Before.”

“Just moments. You grabbed for his jacket. He had an instrument, something small–harmonica. You had a handkerchief around your leg. I don’t know.”

“Yes,” Booth says, leaning closer, intent. “That’s right.”

Lee shakes his head. “It’s fuzzy. On the edges of my memory. Crammed in with all the things I’m supposed to know about me.”

John pauses, looking to the ground, before looking back up into Lee’s eyes again. “What did he think of me?”

“Who?”

“You. Him. Whoever you were before,” he says, tired, pressing the flesh of his palm into his left eye. It makes as little sense to him as it does to Lee. He seems older than he did half a moment ago.

Lee tilts his head to the side. “I don’t know,” he replies, honestly, for once. “Liked Czolgosz. Fighting for the poor man. Guiteau is batshit. You… I’m not sure. Young and tragic.”

Booth furrows his brow. “You think so?”

“Maybe. But you’re also an absolute piece of shit.”

John bites at his lip. It’s a tic that feels far too modern and far too human for Booth, who spends half of his waking energy ensuring that he looks like more than a man, more like a hero. Perhaps it’s the drinks. Perhaps it’s the time. He looks like he’s _thinking,_ like he doesn’t know what Lee means, like he doesn’t know what all of it meant. It’s all fragile. Like he’s made of glass.

“Did you mean what you said in the depository?”

Booth stops resembling glass and returns to stone. “I say quite a lot of things, Lee.”

“Any of it.”

He considers, fingers playing with the buttons of his vest for lack of better distraction. “Yes,” he manages, eventually, after a lifetime, “though I exaggerated some of it. To convince you.”

“All that shit about the guy. What’s his name.”

“Willy. Willy Loman.”

“Yeah,” Lee says. After a second, he laughs through his teeth and elbows John in the side. “Fuck you. You were such a fucking asshole.”

“And _you_ were dumb. Ready to die for attention. It’s always the other way. You should die _because_ of the attention.”

Lee shakes his head and lolls forward. “Nah, you don’t know what it’s like. Everything only gets more complicated. Defecting and un-defecting. Presidents and politics. You didn’t even have a wife.”

“No,” Booth says, solemnly. He doesn’t fight back. Lee wants him to, but he doesn’t. It is this quiet, this violence, this desire for the taste of metal on his tongue that Booth was always right about, Lee Harvey Oswald searching for a fight, searching for attention. Eyes always fall to those who act out. Fists swinging. He never came to grow out of that childish interest, never stopped picking at scabs and skin. Yet, even if Booth can see it in Lee, he doesn’t understand it, and here they lie as opposites. Booth is a pretty face whose gore is written into the pages of Shakespeare, always in verse, always in pentameter. Thinking himself a Brutus is nothing short of ironic; Brutus’ hand withdraws the dagger and sees blood, but Booth aims a pistol and runs and runs and runs. Lee is familiar with running. He can’t blame him.

Lee, with his ears ringing, asks, “Do you actually believe that you’re him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Booth. Do you actually believe that you’re him, not just the idea of him? Or a fragment. Or whatever.”

“Yes,” he says, slowly, carefully, like it is Lee who is made of glass when Lee knows full well that it is the other way, “I do.”

“Do you believe that I’m him?”

“I never tried to martyr you,” Booth says, sighing, turning away. “You changed the world, Lee. You made us heard. You’re the reason Hinckley exists. You shut down the New York stock exchange, made people weep, made people change… That was you. No matter how you did it. Curtain rods or rifles are merely details in the larger picture.”

Johnny pauses, turns to look Lee in the eyes. “It doesn’t matter how you did it. It just matters that it was done.”

Lee doesn’t think that he believes him. It is only when Booth enters the picture that his life is written in stark contrast, high quality, the sharp lines of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s face through a window. He can still feel the weight of the rifle in his hand and the kickback of the gunshot. His own death replays vividly, a bullet to the stomach and then the world in darkness. Still, there is John Wilkes Booth, the optimist, the dreamer, the actor. John Wilkes Booth who first painted the country in red. John Wilkes Booth who first learned that a country could crumble because of one man and who taught all of those to follow that they could pull the trigger, too, and watch the world fall apart.

It’s all a bit too much for Lee to think about, pressed against his bed and John Wilkes Booth as the evening settles, drunk off of vodka with a loosened tongue. Curtain rods turning into rifles, time passing too quickly, images of president’s killers still unborn pleading to him for existence. None of it makes sense. None of it has to.

Luckily, Lee has forever to think about it. For now, he takes the bottle in a tight grip around the neck, tilts back his head, and drinks.

**Author's Note:**

> some of my facts are probably wrong, which i'm okay with! i made some executive decisions about this, which is to say i made some stuff up. i'm not worried about it! sometimes you just gotta post some fanfiction about presidential assassinators and not all of your facts are gonna be right.
> 
> thanks for reading!


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